Band:	Glorior Belli
Album:	Manifesting The Raging Beast
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	June 2007

01. From Darkness There Springs Light
02. Deadly Sparks
03. Sinister Resonance
04. Severed From The Self
05. Manifesting The Raging Beast
06. Said Lucifer In Twilight
07. Serpentine Admonition
08. Altered Verses

I was a little sceptical about this band; I tend to react with that particular feeling when it comes to French Black Metal since the year 2000, apparently people saw that Deathspell Omega was hitting the jackpot (in a metal average) with their typified Raw Black Metal and all of a sudden everyone there started sounding the same, filthy, desperately intense and really freaking raw? Turns out there's a band there that's able to create fresh music with mid-paced hooks and astonishing song writing without scarifying their sound, it's just fresh air in a really thick and suffocating fog.

"Manifesting The Raging Beast" is fortunately not as raw as I thought it would be, on the contrary, it's highly digestible music with its permanent dose of brutality and evil ingenious minds. The whole Glorior Belli spectrum is a mammoth example of what Black Metal can create when it's in the right hands; the musical structure taps the veins of Swedish bands like Marduk for example, but it always manages to keep the original levels up high and most of the time you'll be experimenting new sounds and experiences that's for sure.

The music is not the most complex thing you've ever heard, it's actually quite basic and linear, but the power of the execution and the brutality of the whole scheme makes this album more than memorable; each track has a soul of its own, some of them are slow and catchy, some others are fast and really aggressive and we can even hear epic instalments with a magnificent combination of elements and tones.

The highlights of this album are many to be honest, but in my head the vocal work stole the spotlight from the beginning to the very end; the force of Infestvvs makes this album a shivering experience that will easily scare the faint hearts out there, the lyrical content is also quite amusing to read, blasphemous sentences add to the philosophical approach in each song, it's maybe not original or enlightening, but as I said, it's interesting enough while playing the album in the background.

I'm really amazed by the results, I can easily see Black Metal fans from all over the world enjoying this kind of music, It's a must if you're into this genre and even more if your shelves are packed with Antaeus, Watain or Marduk. Highly Recommended!